Chapter Text
When Jon cuts off the Beholding, he distantly hears a voice end the recording and sees a hand click the off button. He thinks it’s his own voice, his own hand, but “self” is rather difficult to determine right now. Jon’s body then decides it can no longer hold itself in the shape of a person. He’s aware of it tumbling from chair to floor. The corner of the desk is digging deeply into the meat attached to Jon’s arm bone, but he can’t feel it. The wash of pain in his mind is bigger than physical, bleeding out into the space beyond him in a bright white aura, growing to obscure everything else.
He dreams of thousands of glittering eyes.
Then he wakes up. His body is shivering violently. Its eyes refuse to open, but somehow, he can still see too much. He doesn’t know where he is.
He dreams of too many bones.
Then he wakes up. He feels like someone has written hundreds, thousands of pages worth of information on a single sheet of paper and he’s reading it all and it hurts. He doesn’t know who he is.
He dreams of suffocating darkness.
Then he wakes up. His head is too full of everything that he is not. He’s doesn’t know where everything that he is has been displaced to. He can’t quite remember how to breathe.
He dreams of scorching fire.
Then he wakes up. It’s like the feeling when he wakes from a nightmare, boiling up under the blankets, and he desperately needs to shove them off (like doing so can get rid of the dream). But there are no blankets, so he simply lies still.
He dreams of painful emptiness.
Then he wakes up. He groans, squinting at the familiar, dingy tiles of his office ceiling. The lights are still on, and their cold fluorescence burns his retinas. The back of his throat tastes like blood. His head hurts, though the pain has lessened to a level where he doesn’t feel on the verge of passing out again. His whole body aches as well, like he’s been lying on the floor for several hours. That must be what happened, though he can’t remember anything clearly. His recent memory consists only of waves of pain and otherness for an undefined period of time.
There is no point in wallowing. Attempting to see Lukas’ plans has failed, just one more failure to add to the list. He still has things to do. He shoves his stiff body into a sitting position, ignoring vehement protests from his shoulders and back. But he can’t ignore the dizzying wave of nausea that the change in altitude brings. He takes a deep breath through his nose, trying to steady himself, but the smell of blood and fear chokes him. He grabs for the only receptacle he can find (the recycling bin from under the desk) and retches into it.
Of course that’s when Basira walks in. She says nothing, waiting for him to recover enough to answer, he supposes.
The bin was hardly necessary. He hasn’t eaten food in…well. He’s not sure. Long enough that there’s nothing to bring up. If only he could vomit up statements. Plenty of those inside of him. But no. He spits acrid bile and nothing else onto old documents, shuddering.
When he’s sure that’s over he sits back against the desk, breathing hard through his nose and scrubbing at his watering eyes. When he finally looks up at Basira, her expression says “I hoped for better but didn’t really expect it” louder than words could have.
Sorry, Basira, he thinks bitterly. This is all any of us get.
“You dying?” she asks.
He means to snap at her, “Not presently, but any day now.”
Unfortunately, his throat hasn’t recovered enough to speak, so he settles for coughing and shaking his head “no” as gingerly as possible.
“Good,” Basira says curtly, nodding once.
She crosses the room and crouches down to take the bin from his hands, then presses a clean handkerchief and a bottle of water into them instead. She clasps his shoulder briefly before standing. Her grip is strong, steadying, and when she lets go, he feels untethered. The brusque way she carries herself never changes, even as he twists into something piteous. He's glad of it, in a way. It helps reminds him of the emotional distance he should be keeping. Still, something in him clamors for comfort, for someone to care, and to brush his hair back, and to hold him. To offer him tea. He violently halts that line of thought, fiddles with the cloth in his hands.
“I’ll be back in ten minutes. Pull yourself together,” Basira says. Before he can gather the wherewithal to answer, she sweeps out of the room.
Pull yourself together.
Her choice of words echoes in his skull. It’s almost funny. He thinks of hacking at his own fingers, of the rib in his desk, of the body that was decidedly not his own for the last several hours. The body that doesn’t really feel like his own even now. He’s spent so long tearing himself apart, he’ll certainly never be able to pull all the pieces back together again.
Pull yourself together.
He chuckles to himself.
Pull yourself together.
He full-on laughs, deep and jagged, far more than an edge of hysteria in the sound.
Pull yourself together.
Once he’s started, he can’t stop. He laughs until tears pour down his face, until dark spots cloud his vision as he gasps for air around the violent bouts of mirth. The pain in his head flares so strongly he thinks he might pass out again. But he doesn’t, and by the time Basira returns, the fit is over, leaving him feeling incredibly empty. He’s put himself back in his chair, he’s rinsed his mouth, and his eyes are dry. He has pulled together all the pieces he can, and he is still full of holes.